Producing, trading and selling jewelry containing precious metal requires significant investment of capital largely due to the high value of the metal itself. For example, the financing inventory of gold jewelry typically is given in the form of a gold loan, granted by a financial institution such as a bank to a retailer or a wholesaler. However, since the loan is in the form of gold rather than in actual currency value, it presents several problems, such as exposure to the fluctuations in gold prices and a significant capital investment to start a retail establishment, either in purchasing actual stock or providing a cash margin to a bank as collateral for the gold loan.
The effects on the industry can be devastating and, after sharp increases in gold prices in September 1999, May 2006 and February 2008, several small retailers declared bankruptcy and medium-size and larger retailers were forced to reduce their stocks dramatically or close some of their retail locations, or both. Wild and continuous fluctuations in the gold price also have a negative effect. For example, in 2006, and more recently in 2008 there were several spikes of $100 or more.
In one alternative method of financing gold jewelry, the jeweler and a financier enter into a swap transaction, whereby the jeweler passes title of her jewelry to the financier and the financier, in return, provides her with an equivalent value in gold ounces at the then prevailing price of gold. The financier places the swapped gold jewelry, which he now effectively owns, on consignment at the jeweler's retail location. This process, however, requires a very accurate measurement of the amount of gold contained in each piece of jewelry under consignment. In cases where the piece includes many embedded stones, such a determination can be difficult and time consuming.
Conventional methods for accurately capturing the weight of a gemstone (or a collection of gemstones) mounted on an article of jewelry is simply to un-mount the gemstones, weigh the stones on a sufficiently accurate scale, and remount the stones. Clearly, such proposed method suffers from several drawbacks, including potentially inflicting damage to the article and the stone, invalidating the manufacturer's warranty, and being highly labor-intensive and time-consuming. Further, this method becomes completely infeasible when the jewelry article in question contains dozens of mounted gemstones, which is common. In many cases, especially when analyzing jewelry having a significant amount of gold (or other precious metal), knowing the exact weight of the gemstones permits the calculation of the weight of the gold used in the item. Such knowledge is critical, in that much of the precious metal-based jewelry is financed through banks and dealers who based valuation and financing terms on the amount of gold (or other metal) used in the item.
What is needed, therefore, are non-intrusive, accurate methods and supporting systems for rapidly determining the weight attributed to gemstones in an article of jewelry.